As the need for energy continues to increase, the supply of easily accessible oil reserves steadily decreases. Accordingly, there exists a need to replace the diminishing supplies of oil reserves. Tar sands have been studied extensively over the past two decades as a source for oil. Many of the conventional processes for recovering oil from tar sands use large quantities of heat to aid in separation of the oil from the tar sands. The cost of heating makes many of these processes uneconomical. A process to separate oil from tar sands has not yet been developed that is feasible or economically viable to compete with the currently available sources of oil.